Tuesday 1 April 2014 09.05 EDT
First published on Tuesday 1 April 2014 09.05 EDT

I've been having some personal problems. A vindictive stalker has made me second-guess my every word and action; stress and misunderstanding have occasionally strained my relationship with my partner. Coping with these concerns, on top of the daily strains of being a sex worker in this economy, I have found that my kettle occasionally boils over and I feel the need to blow off steam, to vent.

Sadly, the era of venting may have passed me by. At university my crowd was a close-knit collection of misfits; none of us was very stable and our drug and experimental sex habits didn't help. We endlessly dissected our frustrations and passions. Today, I have many wonderful, supportive friends, but we rarely confide in each other. Perhaps we acknowledge that everyone has issues and we shouldn't burden anyone with our own.

On social media my friends' posts tend towards the minor but humorous gripe. One might complain of stress or sleeplessness, but straightforward mentions of serious troubles are rare. Maybe we avoid posting them because we are afraid of seeming weak, of being attacked, or of causing harm to ourselves and to others through our honesty. Instead we post vague updates, indirectly encouraging support from trusted friends.

This tendency to hide our distress affords us many social benefits. Conceivably, it forms part of the national bedrock of civility that welcomed and delighted me as a new immigrant. It's also important to remember that our love of privacy has fuelled our righteous outrage at state surveillance of our calls and emails. However, we pay heavy costs for our social privacy. We risk soldiering on as our relationships disintegrate, as we search for work, or as we struggle to make ends meet.

I have a young friend who will show up bright and cheerful for a social engagement trying to hide the fact she is weak with hunger. To directly offer her my support would embarrass her; she was raised to find it shameful to ask for help. Empathy alone couldn't overcome her embarrassment. What finally got through was an understanding that the recession, not personal failure, was the principal cause of her joblessness.

So many of our private concerns are actually matters of public import. My young friend's hunger and my travails in business can both be blamed on our age of heartless austerity. So can the anguish of a disabled person forced to choose between inappropriate work assignments and destitution. So too can the terror of a transgendered person forced to live closeted in order to compete at work or to avoid violence and rejection. Our struggles seem shameful only when contemplated in isolation; learning that we live in a brutal, exploitative system we put them in context and find, happily, that we are not alone.

There are glimmers of a different approach. A few weeks ago, I noticed on Facebook that my friend, an inspiring woman who lives with bipolar disorder, had broadened her daily selection of uplifting memes to include sombre, arresting descriptions of the pain and loneliness felt by a person suffering a depressive episode. I asked her what had moved her to open up in this way. She explained that her posts had encouraged her friends to open up about their own struggles; in posting about the darkness of depression she could acknowledge and support those still submerged in its depths. In his magnificent Walden, Henry David Thoreau famously said: "The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation." To lift ourselves out of desperation may take generations; until then, lets voice our despairs and find ourselves, and each other, through the common themes of our laments.